Veteran underwater photographer David Doubilet has spent the past 50 years documenting incredible creatures in his favorite place on earth—and seeing climate change firsthand. We chatted with Doubilet about why he keeps going back to the Coral Triangle—a 2.2 million square-mile region of ocean the borders Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste—and got his best diving stories.
What first drew you to this part of the world?
“My whole life has revolved around coral reefs. I first saw them when I was 12, in the Caribbean, and it changed everything for me, but this region between the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, and Indonesia is my favorite. Within this island system are the richest coral reefs in the world, nearly 600 species—the highest marine biodiversity on the planet. As an underwater photographer, that's what you search for, somewhere you can stop and watch as the reef glitters in front of you.”
Your first diving memory?
“My earliest dive, in Raja Ampat, Indonesia, was off a place called Cape Kri, a reef that surrounds the tip of the island of Mansuar. We got in the water, and I looked up toward the surface, and there was one single curtain of moving fish, a huge surge of movement. Along the edge of the reef was another one, and below that, the coral, with little blossoms in every color you can imagine, like hallucinogenic broccoli. Then a river of silver cardinal fish, and clown fish in their anemones, and snake eels, which look like something out of Star Wars, and all of this just in one sweep of turning your head. I remember thinking, How am I ever going to make one image of this? It's like a thousand people singing different songs—lovely but unfathomable.”
Favorite shot of this area?
“There was a story that I did in Kimbe Bay, and what should have been a very easy shoot turned out to be very difficult. There had been a monsoon, so I only had four diving days, but I got two covers from it—that's how incredible it is. We found an underwater meadow of beautiful shallow coral by one little island, in still water with these dramatic, rolling mountains in the background, a calm paradise. As I was shooting, a father and son came by on a canoe and started fishing. It was perfect: one of those days where everything came together in this magical way.”
The best place to dive?
“At the very western tip of the great island of New Guinea is a place called the Bird's Head Peninsula; underwater is like a Jackson Pollock painting come to life. It's an assault of biodiversity, undulating life upon life upon life—intensely dimensional. Jacques Cousteau had a wonderful expression for reefs—he called them ‘stony pastures,’ and that's exactly right.”
How about night diving?
“In the Philippines, which is a total smorgasbord of life, we were diving along the reef systems, where there's a day-to-night shift in the oceans—the plankton, which is everything from larvae to tiny octopuses, all come up to feed at night, when they won't be caught. We put down a long string of lights so we could see them, and to not get lost. It takes a while to focus, but suddenly you tune in to this other world—a menagerie of the strangest life-forms, micro-jellyfish and fish eggs, surrounding you. You just hope you don't see anything larger!”
Most dangerous dive?
“I was in the water with tiger sharks that were feeding on a sperm whale out in the Solomon Sea—it can be dangerous, but you learn very quickly not to get between a shark and its food. As the sun came down and the whale drifted to sea, more sharks were appearing. You're your own worst enemy underwater, especially as a photographer—you always want that one last shot—but I've been chased out of the water enough times to know when it's time to go!”
A truly unexpected sight?
“Everything is unexpected! That's what I love about shooting underwater—it's the inverse of the world that we know. One moment that comes to mind is when we launched the Perpetual Planet project with Rolex, a series to document our world and the effects of climate change. We were exploring the Tubbataha Reefs system in the Philippines, in the heart of the Sulu Sea. It's the first marine-protected World Heritage Site, and you can only dive here three months of the year. It starts relatively shallow, but then we went out into the wide ocean and there was a sudden drop, just nothingness stretching out in front of you. It reminded me of the Earthrise image taken by Major Anders from the window of Apollo 8 in 1968. You see the Earth and realize that's all there is—it's all we have. Finite.”
An emotional trip?
“We went to a series of reefs in Australia's Coral Sea—I had been there previously, and it was this beautiful forest of plate corals, full of life. When we returned 10 years later, it was a stone desert. There had been three years of coral bleaching, where the rise in temperature causes algae to die, since 2016. I'm very proud to have this perspective from the past 50 years of my life. Those pictures are very hard to take, but they're the most important ones—they're the wake-up call.”
Your role in conservation?
“People call us wildlife photographers, but we're journalists, and we're telling the most important story on earth—that of Earth itself. Coral is the eighth continent, and when reefs that have been here for 5,000 years are dying, you know something isn't right.”
What's next?
“I'm returning to Raja Ampat to continue work on Coral Through the Lens of Time, a project with National Geographic and Rolex. It's funny that Rolex is involved, because time itself is so important, and we're running out of it. I need to document these vibrant worlds as fast as I can to inspire the next generation of storytellers, so they can stand on my shoulders and reach even further.”
Doubilet has been a Rolex Testimonee since 1994 and works with the brand's new Perpetual Planet project to map our changing ecosystems.